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We are starting a new collaboration with Formatting Architecture, an intensive one-week workshop for 30 students and recent graduates of architecture or any other related field.
An international workshop that will be held at the headquarters of COAIB (Chamber of Architects) in Palma de Mallorca during the first week of July 2015.
The workshop arises from an open approach to the concept of 'the architectonic' at a moment where the figure of the architect is in an uncertain position that makes pertinent (even necessary) an inclusive and non-dogmatic approach to its work.

Closed architecture

Clement Valla

The universal texture

Andreas Angelidakis

Domesticated mountain

Carmelo Rodriguez Cedillo

Six cases of architectural dysmegalopsia

The figure of the architect is perverse. There is an unnecessary amount of identity. Architecture at the beginning of the 21st century is a discipline which tends not only towards perversity, but which discredits itself with the same mechanisms through which it manifests itself. Contemporaneity, coherence, reprogramming and interdisciplinary are absent terms. On the other hand, continuity, staticity, permanence and artist, are descriptors self-attributed by a large number of professionals in an effort to vindicate an autistic and timeless character of the profession. Even with the most extravagant designing procedures and projects, we find, behind all that pornographic imagery, attitudes just as decontextualised as the architectural production they suggest.

There is a form of architecture that aims at not being built. An architecture on paper that should not be confused with paper architecture. An architecture based on pure statements in which real brick, mortar and poured concrete are substituted by paper cut-outs and narrative prose. An architecture on the failed and accomplished aspirations of buildings and master plans. An architecture which, although focused on the critique of these aspirations, is not interested in just any form of critique.

What told the children of thegenerations prior to the massification of mobile phones that it was dinnertime were shouts. Those muezzin cries accompanied the children home, but only to the symbolic home. It was the call of the reverie described by Bachelard, while ‘home’ in the deep sense was a much vaster practical domain, extending on to the street and defined by an empirical and emotional geography.

In 1999, Fleur Agema (1976) acquired her Bachelor’s degree after a four-year study of Architectural Design at the AKI Academy of Visual Arts and Design in Enschede, the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam, and subsequently her Master’s degree in Interior Design at the Utrecht School of the Arts. She graduated from the latter with a project titled Closed Architecture; an ambitious model for a new prison, intended to occupy over a hundred acres at the Hembrugterrein in the Zaan area [an old military complex- TN], and aims to reintegrate prisoners into society.

I collect Google Earth images. I discovered them by accident, these particularly strange snapshots, where the illusion of a seamless and accurate representation of the Earth’s surface seems to break down. I was Google Earth-ing, when I noticed that a striking number of buildings looked as if they were upside down. I could tell there were two competing visual inputs here –the 3d model that formed the surface of the earth, and the mapping of the aerial photography– they didn’t match up. Depth cues in the aerial photographs, like shadows and lighting, were not aligning with the depth cues of the 3d model.

Domesticated Mountain targets the suburban home as the traditional vehicle
for an architectural manifesto.
Positioning the home in an expanded notion of suburbia, i.e.: The internet; the
suburban home is the accumulation of all the things we do online, and so it
needs to be redefined from scratch.

Most of the architectural predictions in the context of the 60s and early 70s, mapped in Arqueología del Futuro (Archaeology of the future), concur in the need to redefine the formal reference system used in the architectural discipline in order to adjust to its social
and cultural context. This redefinition should stem from two fundamental premises; on one hand, equating architecture’s formal heterogeneity with the system of consumer objects that exist around it, centre stage in predictions from authors such as Peter Cook and Charles Jencks; and on the other hand, hybridising architecture with other disciplines so that they evolve in parallel, as seen in concepts such as futurologist Michel Ragon’s architecture sculpture 4, and as opposed to the total segregation between architecture and other arts promoted by the Modern Movement.

DANIEL FERNÁNDEZ PASCUAL

Partytopias in Berlin

+15

MANUEL COLLADO

The allure of the analogue caves

+18

An interview with MI 5

Sacred Clowns

+12

Andrea Lissoni / Tomás Saraceno

On space time foam

+8

Esteban Salcedo

Planet festival

+9

Jakob Tigges

Exodus & The Berg

+4

Juan Elvira

Radical Atmospheres

+27

María Langarita

States of emergency

Partytopias are one of the most fragile housing typologies,
& in their fragility lies their incredible potential. They consist of n madic structures that set up an ephemeral living s-pace during the celebration of a party. They allow the party to happen and they constitute the party in themselves. Ifpartiesrununinterruptedforsixdays, partytopias need to provide a whole set of gadgets, actions, provocations and infrastructure for people to laugh, touch each other’s bodies, smell each others’ bodies, lick each others’s’ bodies, eat, inhale, xhale, sleep, play, participate in orgies, explore sexualities or simply interact in s-pace.

If within the same closed environment we mix: the developments in electrification driven by technologies used in multimedia festivals, the transformation of psychedelic spaces by means of surface techniques such as supergraphics, reflective walls or acid-coloured murals, and the experimentation of their users; the resulting cocktail is without a doubt one of psychedelia’s most significant contributions to cultural and contemporary spatial typologies.

"The concept of Identity is one of the most important ones we work with, both in our architectural career and with our students. The idea of identity we suggest is broad, complex... understood not only from an analytical perspective but also from a propositional one. In our work we seek to redefine the term. We search for something like a post-identity, something which will translate into the capacity or the freedom to build Identities, and which is always above values of moral, culture, religion or gender. One of the ideas which most interests us at the moment is how architectural tools can contribute to the building of subcultures and social identities. Ultimately, we pose the question of which kind of tools can be used to build identity while working with space."

When Tomás Saraceno first visited the Cubo space at HangarBicocca, he imagined it could hold a huge sphere suspended mid-air entirely by cables. The project evolved rapidly, contemplating two spheres and, little by little, no trace of the original idea was left: the Cubo was ready to house the largest inflatable surface accessible to the public the artist had ever made. The project continued to change, finally acquiring its definitive appearance, that of a transparent membrane hooked to the walls of the Cubo, sustained by air and accessible from three levels.

“It was a never-ending party; I saw everyone and no one, as every person would get lost in the wandering crowds of countless people; I would talk to everybody without remembering my words or their words, as with each step my attention was grabbed by new events and objects [...]”

She felt tired was all she told her therapist. After having been stared at for eight long decades by Empire State Building I want to stare at something fancy myself, she thought. True there were ups ad downs, and lately, that is after the terrible demise of her taller twin colleagues, she had once again been getting as much admiration as she had had in the early days.

Atmosphere is an inevitable architectural element. Architectural experience is simply not possible without atmosphere. Should it be negated, a certain atmosphere will also emerge. When experiencing a specific space, it is not only the physical enclosure of the building which envelops us, but also the number of ephemeral and fluctuating effects which emanate from it. Its common acceptation refers to the emanations of an object, specifically a celestial body, the Earth. The sensual emission of heat, light, humidity, etc. is the generic figure of atmosphere, and the one which has remained most productively in the field of architecture. Independently from its literal meteorological acceptation, from the 18th century this term has also been used to refer to spaces with an affective charge, and to talk about what certain people radiate, such as aureoles or auras. Atmospheres are generally attributed a character, a certain way of emotionally affecting us. It is what objects and subjects have in common, or what makes them distinctive in the environment where they cohabit.

People in society follow their goals, manage their resources, approach conflicts in an environment of rules and institutions. This context is built on a series of negotiations, conventions and agreements which accumulate over time. Law, the judiciary context, is the set of norms ordering life in society. It is a hierarchical collection, a structure. It is a structure which reveals, describes, but also a designed, devised and prescriptive structure. This ‘architecture’ organises the times, places and modes of our activity taking into account that of others and the resources available: today yes, tomorrow no; this way like this, that way, no; you yes, them no; who them, who us.

Nine contradictions / During the time we have developed the publication, we have learned (or un-learned) that many of our starting convictions were erroneous. Our answer to that schizophrenic landscape in which we landed was full of fears and doubts. A year later we show, proud, our contradictions, those which really may help to give a definition (or uncertainty) of our work /

identity

We claim an uncertain appearance. We have several names, but they are actually the same. We defend the imprecision of the formal structure of our work. We seek for an identity, but we want it to be increasingly unstable. We will not repeat again the same word we already said.

editing

Are already there all the existing texts? How many new combinations of words are left?
Perhaps, in the contemporary time, our work is limited to the task of relocating the existing parts. The work of editing, as a post-production, in the center of the scene. Reorganizing from the existing. And never more handling the new. All things similar to each other, but never exactly the same.

format

Is the book ceasing to exist? Or, on the contrary, living its revival? Publishing, especially in architecture, seems to be at its best. The architect clings to paper in order to fictionalize the world to come, but fails to get it built. Too many middlemen, too many agents involved. Everything has become too complicated.

blur

The network thinking shows us that the world is full of good ideas. And we are in constant contact with them, with fleeting good ideas. In that sense the editing work nowadays may look more like the everyday action of sitting in front of the computer attentive to the information flow passing in front of us, trying to catch the things we are interested on. The romantic image of an editor sitting in a chair waiting for someone asking to publish his work is over. But we must be alert.